I have a lot of designers send me layered PSDs of their designs and I need to break out the pieces of the designs to place on web pages. I can do a decent number of things in Photoshop, but I'm hardly efficient with it.

My old way of just copying the image that's in a layer and pasting into a new image seems to take forever as I screw around with cropping and such.

I've got Photoshop CS5, so I don't need external software to do anything, but I just need to figure out how to take a single layer, that may hold something small like an icon, and export it as a PNG or JPG.

I am aware of the script called "Export Layers to Files" but it took about an hour and exported ALL of my layers to a huge number of files. I wasn't looking for a solution that broad.

7 Answers
7

To export a single layer or a group of layers in Photoshop you must have only those relevant layer(s) that you want to export visible. (So hide all the layers that you don't want to export and keep the relevant one's visible.) Then go to File - Save for web and save your image.

To understand this process in depth please have a look at this tutorial.

Yes, so if your original image is larger than the layers you have to go back to all the exported images and crop them. To get around this use Smart Objects, see my answer below.
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reflexivJan 29 '13 at 17:29

Hide any overlapping layers that contain pixels you don't want to
export (if they don't overlap the area you're interested in, you can leave them showing).

Create a slice for the section you're interested in, using either
the Layers menu: "New Layer Based Slice" (which is fairly automatic)
or else manually create it with the Slice tool. Make sure your new
slice is the only one that's selected (there's a slice select tool
right next to the one that creates slices, in the same flyout menu).

In the Save for Web dialog, make sure the slice is still
selected.(That dialog has its own slice select tool if you need it.)

During the save process, there's a popdown menu; make sure you've
chosen Selected Slices so it doesn't save everything.

Most people don't use slices any more, since they were designed for the earlier days of the Web when individual images were often sliced up and then reassembled in HTML -- rarely done now. But I still find them useful for this purpose.

Unfortunately, the interface for slices hasn't been updated and they can be a little awkward to use, but see whether they help in your situation.